Movies are typically distributed to theaters on heavy reels of film. When received, a set of reels containing a movie is moved to a projection booth, and there the film on the reels is spliced together. Pre-movie content such as advertisements, movie trailers, theater announcements, etc., is also spliced to the movie prior to showtime. The process of distributing, receiving and preparing a movie for presentation can be an expensive and labor-intensive process.
Movies and pre-movie content can now be distributed, received and shown in digital format. When received by a theater, digital movies and digital pre-movie content can be stored in respective files on a disk drive of a computer system (e.g., a server), which in turn is coupled to a digital projector. At showtime digital content of a movie or pre-movie content is read from an opened file and provided to the digital projector for presentation to an audience. Unfortunately, heavily-accessed playout disk drives or other components can fail at the worst of times, i.e., while a movie is being presented to an audience. A disk drive or other component failure may disrupt the flow of digital content from an opened movie file to the digital projector, thus disrupting the movie's presentation.